I have been listening to John Prine of late.  He has been in Intensive Care, a victim of the COVID19.  Touch and go.  One YouTube vid I looked at was one where he tooled around the old Chicago neighborhood where he lived and wrote the song, “Bruised Orange”.

I love these deep dives into the origins of a song. I call them “ludic shuffles.” In other words making clear the “how-to” of creative play that weaves through any song (or poem or…).  Even better: see how Prine fits together disparate elements of the human condition with his own simple observations into one all-encompassing carousel.

He made me consider my own muse of late. A neglected pool, I fear.  At best I have only a very small  audience here who come by every once in awhile for a drink of poetry at my pub. Few though they be and very fine that they are, it would seem that I haven’t had much on offer here. Even a moment’s pause tells me that unless I dip out that pool on a regular basis, it will stagnate. You gotta do the ludic shuffle even if you dance like poleaxe-drunk hippo.

That’s why Prine’s ramblings while driving are so important to me. They are the map that by some miracle is also the territory.  Prine is channeling his world but, also, THE world.

Here is my raw material from my world, unchanneled and waiting to root, slowly rotating, inchoate and raw but conceptualizing…learning inside itself. Below is my way of taking you for a ride in the car that is my life.  Enjoy, my friends, few and fine and far-flung all.

My World

Wagon load of hay, 2 tons

Mold on it.

Zoom faculty meetings

Mold in it.

The World

Equivalent work?

Yeoman’s work? (Story of how I came to my KY county and first heard really old farm folk calling my ‘ewes’ yeow’s. I am the only one left to tell that story?)

Working class teaching —–> working class farming

My World

Trout lilies, one wild blink and then gone for a year.

Walking sheep to the field, no different than any shepherd ever, my crook in hand.

Reminded of documentaries of timelapse mycelial growth

Stars and spring peepers

Pear tree blossom snow storm

with pollinating pizzazz, a hum like a drum but not humdrum,

Muddy rams that need shearing.

The World

Unprepared for the world

that moves me.

The clearest vision

comes from unfocusing toward the periphery

where most of the vision resides.

The surest hearing

comes from cupping your hand and tuning.

Start as a hedgehog and teach yourself one think,

then play with the many masks of the fox,

and then re-focus from the many to the one,

one vision not entirely a single way,

but just enough so that I can make my way.

My World

Blankets of air,

Layers,

Warm

then cool.

Drafts of night air

on the back of my neck

come and go

as I walk to the field

to check our lambs.

Subtle.

Had I not become a shepherd,

I would never have known this

nearly mute touch,

this unflattened topographic map,

this ludic shuffle.